The above-averageness of American families reflects trends that aren’t conducive to flourishing families or a flourishing nation in the future.
In an argument against showering more government subsidies and spending on American families, Dominic Pino pulls out the statistics to show that American families are doing great. He writes:
So if you’re thinking about how someone could raise a family on some level of income, and your definition of “family” is “married couple with children,” you can take some comfort in the fact that right now the median income for those families is in the neighborhood of $120,000. (The $119,400 number includes married couples without children, but we know from other Census Bureau data that they have a slightly lower median income than those with children.)
That puts the median American married couple with children solidly in the upper-middle class, as defined by income. And that’s the median, not the mean, so it isn’t affected by wealthy outliers.
Now, I think Dominic is probably right that this cohort needs less government intervention in the form of subsidy. In fact, in many cases it is government regulation, or Baumol’s cost disease, that is driving these families to their costlier standard of living, pressuring them to earn more and leading to the hothouse feeling of vulnerability that Elizabeth Warren tried to describe in The Two-Income Trap.
While it may be a great privilege to be born into the median American family household, the above-averageness of American families reflects trends that aren’t conducive to flourishing families or a flourishing nation in the future. The first is that people are delaying their marriages and decision to have children deeper and deeper into their career life and therefore closer to their peak earning years.
What we’re also seeing is fewer people of lower incomes getting married and forming stable households at all. We know that family life is associated with all sorts of positive economic benefits — married men in a house with their own children will tend to earn more over a career and live longer.
But the estate of marriage — and the family way of life more generally — is valuable especially to the poor for the way it helps people economize or substitute market goods with ones generated by the existence of kith and kin. People in denser kith-and-kin networks often gain access to needed resources — a temporarily borrowed car, a hammer, or a bit of child care; a tip on an open economic opportunity — through that network. With plunging birth rates, every generation of Americans is likelier to be born into a less dense kith-and-kin network — meaning fewer of these resources.
We’re seeing that American family life is mostly for upper-middle-class households the way Rolex watches are. Like those Swiss tool watches, they’ve become part of a life that has become much less accessible to the working class and poor in just a few decades.
Dominic began his post writing, “Sometimes people look at general income data and wonder, ‘How could people raise a family on that?’ The answer in many cases is, ‘They don’t.’”
Correct. In the richest nation that ever existed, where the poor have enough calories to be obese and the spare income to own what were recently luxury electronics, they’ve lost something far more valuable — and the costs to the rest of the society are only going to compound over time.